From one of the main Ethereum clients, to Polkadot to Substrate; Parity has become exceptional at developing successful open-source blockchain projects. Their latest effort Substrate provides a framework to easily create custom blockchains. Building on cutting-edge technologies like Web Assembly, Substrate also offers automated on-chain upgrades.

We were joined by Gavin Wood, who was previously co-founder and CTO of Ethereum and founded Parity. We talked about the early Ethereum days, how Parity got started, Substrate, Polkadot and his views on on-chain governance.

Topics discussed in this episode:

The genesis story of Ethereum

Why Gavin prefers reasoning from first principles to reading

How Parity shunned Silicon Valley principles to build an developer-driven company

Why they decided to work on a scalable blockchain from scratch instead of improving Ethereum

An overview of Substrate

The relationship between Substrate and Polkadot

How Substrate allows switching consensus in a live blockchain

Why Ethereum’s governance process is centralized

Polkadot and the case for on-chain governance

Links mentioned in this episode:

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